I am a consultant, speaker, and blogger that is passionate about enabling B2B companies to define, implement and measure best practices to turn customer experience into their biggest sales and brand differentiator. Using the Sellers' Compass methodology, I work with companies to accelerate their revenue cycles by aligning culture, processes and systems outward to customers and markets. I'm looking for innovation and best practices to share with my readers.

9/18/2011 @ 12:06PM11,903 views

How to Start Your Own "Arab Spring"

The need for change is in the air; it comes up in every conversation. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s Chairman and CEO passionately espoused change at Dreamforce. His call to the world was that companies need to change or be left behind. He went one step further and gave a dire warning to CEOs – change thyself or fall from grace.

Companies that do not become Social Enterprises will not survive this economic cycle. Becoming a Social Enterprise is, however, more than just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It is a transformation in how your business thinks, decides, works and collaborates. Brought into the enterprise by the Gen Y generation, social media has since redefined relationships within, between and among enterprises from the bottom up.

It was, however, the Millenniums who forced enterprises on the path of change. As they entered the workforce en masse, their refusal to use non-Googlesque technology and blindly follow processes dictated by corporate systems was the spark of the revolution. The rise of mobile as the new computing platform fueled the transformation to the Social Enterprise.

Successful transformations need roadmaps otherwise how do you know how to get from here to there. A roadmap for transforming to social selling is the Buyers Journey; a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers and market constituents. Through an ‘outside-in’ redefinition of how a company interacts with its markets, the Buyers Journey embraces and turns to an advantage the fact that over 70% of B2B purchase cycles are self-directed, trust-based, social and invisible to vendors and suppliers. Companies that embrace the Buyers Journey experience significantly faster revenue cycles, lower cost of sales and churn rates.

(c) 2011 NBS Consulting Group, Inc.

Like all transformations, the one for Social Enterprise is part people, process and technology. Changing people’s perspectives, beliefs, and attitudes about social technology is critical to the transformation. Frankly, that is Marc Benioff’s calling and one he performs very well.

My quest at Dreamforce was to discover if the technology was there to support Salesforce’s vision. Who were the technology vendors that help companies operationalize the Buyers Journey? While I didn’t find any paradigm shifters, I did discover some innovative solutions.

Optify, a social marketing automation vendor, discovers buyers who are starting their purchase journeys. Started in 2008 and with 35 employees today, Optify helps companies like LexisNexus, Skytap, Microsoft Office Live, and allrecipes.com optimize buyer enablement activities. Brian Goffman, CEO and co-founder of Optify, said “The company’s mission is to drive the very top of the funnel.” With a full set of SEO capabilities, the solution helps you know where your buyers go so you can get a jump start on identifying those ready to engage. Optify then reports on the ROI of social media marketing by linking keywords, tweets, etc. with ‘won’ and ‘closed/lost’ opportunities with full data drill down.

The solution connects the dots between keyword performance, page views, leads, and campaigns to help marketers hone their investment strategy. It even goes a step further and can recommend keywords to try to improve the results.

With all the data they collect, I wanted to know if they could discover and plot out the path buyers take in the early stages of the Buyers Journey. Sadly, not yet but they can report on the path taken after the first point of contact. Later this year Optify plans to release capabilities that “turn page views into real-time moments”. That’s great but they had me won over when they showed me how easy it was to correlate buyer behavior with social media ROI investments.

If you haven’t done the research to know the step-by-step moves buyers take, eTrigue can help. eTrigue marketing automation enables marketing to discover the longitudinal paths anonymous visitors take through your website, convert them into qualified buyers, and then customizes campaigns for them based on behavior.

eTrigue helps embrace the principles of the Buyers Journey with its time-based story board approach to analyzing visitor behavior and managing campaigns. Jim Meyer, eTrigue’s vice president of sales and general manager, emphasized that the only way Social Enterprises will be successful is if they “experiment their way to success”. His research found that the odds of reaching a buyer increases by tenfold if you call within an hour of their visit to your website and with their longitudinal history in hand your conversation will be more contextual which increases by six fold Sales’ ability to qualify correctly. Born out of an agency, profitable, and self-funded with 60 employees, eTrigue helps marketing build more intelligent social and traditional media campaigns.

Sometimes, however, Sales just has to do the heavy lifting. Finding a way into a target account can be one of the hardest tasks a sales person has to do and why a salesperson’s Rolodex – er, LinkedIn network – is their biggest asset next to closing skills.

Reachable supports social selling. The company is coming out of stealth mode and is already touting customers like Actuate and Heidrick & Struggles. With its own tab in Salesforce.com, it builds a social graph of your social and physical networks augmented with public data from Zoominfo and other sources. Based on whom you want to meet, you can create your own ideal networks, score contacts based on how well you know them (or how helpful they are), and Reachable tells you the best connection path to your target buyers. Sounds like something you’d use LinkedIn for, right? Not even close; Reachable is much broader. In fact LinkedIn would be a great partner for Reachable.

Reachable’s secret sauce is their graph engine that connects the social dots and data algorithms which scores and finds the best path between you and your target buyer. Reachable is a one-way social network where you can add contacts you know and expand your professional network without needing their permission. Reachable’s Share Group feature allows you to share your network with your sales team to greatly expand your reachable network and multiply the possible paths to your buyer. According to Al Campa, Reachable CEO, “the product helps you open new accounts and use a “Z” strategy to further penetrate accounts by targeting a whole organization and multiple constituents for a successful enterprise sale.”

Reachable is free for single user base functionality. For an additional $49/month/ per user you can share your network with your team and integrate Reachable with your CRM system. A reasonable price to eliminate those dreaded cold calls; making them or receiving them.

Solutions that discover and understand early stages of the Buyers Journey are key in aligning to buyers. Needed next are solutions that use social and mobile to engage and enable buyers as they evaluate suppliers and validate their purchase decision.

Seesmic, with 50 employees and funding from Salesforce, uniquely combines true social CRM with mobile. Seesmic is comprised of two product suites: Seesmic CRM and Seesmic Social. Seesmic Social is a suite of social media management applications, available on your mobile, desktop, and web specifically for the Buyer Enablement portion of the Buyers Journey. Seesmic sees marketing and selling very differently; for them these are acts of participation, co-creation, enablement and engagement between the buyer and vendor. “Social is an engagement platform”, says Bastien Vidal, Chief Operating Officer of Seesmic. That mindset is evident in how they have designed their applications.

The user interface is readable and seems simplistic until you watch someone use the applications. Watching Liza Sperling, Seesmic’s Director of Corporate Relationships, manage the company’s social interactions on her phone, it was obvious there are no boundaries between Seesmic’s mobile, social and CRM capabilities. Using Seesmic CRM, Liza generated an email to a contact, shared a question from the contact with an internal Chatter group, and responded to the contact along with a reference to some marketing activities all from her phone. One of Seesmic’s core design principles is to deliver a compelling experience that is easy to use and actually encourages adoption by mirroring common workflow patterns.

Bastien Vidal sees the transformation to a Social Enterprise “as a journey, not a set of yes/no decisions.” “Not everyone in the enterprise world understands how to leverage social”, says Vidal, “But it is the social component that is the game changer.” Two key factors that drive the transformation to a Social Enterprise are, first, an employee base that wants a consumer social experience at work and, more importantly, knows how to take advantage of it. Second, company leadership realizes that social and mobile technologies drives productivity which in turn drives better collaboration. Vidal went on to stress the importance that company culture plays in becoming a Social Enterprise.

Not every company is ready to become a Social Enterprise. How can you tell if you’re ready? Does your company see social media and mobile as a way to help people do their job faster and easier?

Becoming a Social Enterprise is a learning process and the Buyers Journey is a pathway forward. According to Seesmic’s Vidal there is a strong correlation between companies who innovate via co-creation, collaborate using social media and mobile CRM – these companies are culturally ready to embrace the Buyers Journey principles and become a Social Enterprise.

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OK, I get the reason for the title, I just read Benioff’s interview. But still… The social CRM is just the translation of the Web 2.0 (or call it whatever you like) within the company. (And I think this is a great step forward).

Sorry – It’s really not you – it’s Marc. It’s a bad comparison (IMHO). Your title is fine. Although it might have been nice to see a raised eyebrow somewhere. Probably here (http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecrandell/2011/09/03/salesforce-com-ceo-calls-for-a-business-arab-spring/) would have been the right place to at least parenthetically note that the comparison might be a little insensitive.